One Guild Wars design decision that beats the competition is the crafting storage tab. Crafting materials stack up to 250, and one tab of your storage holds one stack of each. All storage in Guild Wars is shared, so all your (post-Searing) characters have access. You could duplicate the effect by giving players two more storage tabs, since this is effectively 36 slots, but this comes pre-organized and of course for the specific purpose of crafting. (NCSoft could also remove the cap of 250, which seems arbitrary, low for common materials and very high for rare.) Aligning with other design decisions, Guild Wars does not have tiers of crafting materials as you level up, although having a crafting tab would be even more useful there (potentially messier in the UI).
Splitting “crafting storage,” Guild Wars crafting is not exactly rigorous. The crafters are basically collector NPCs with shared materials. Storage in Guild Wars is simple, shared, and rather inadequate if you want to keep all those collector drops. The vault is expandable at $10/pane, which feels a bit pricey, although it’s tempting with all these frog and bug bits about. I need to do some muling.
: Zubon
Muling is the way to go, unfortunately. even the most prudent of savers will find it difficult
to find space for everything. I think that’s one of the skills you have to learn for every mmo: what is worth keeping and what is just merchant fodder.
But the vast majority of GW monster bits are valuable at the right time and place when the Traveler wants them, when they can be traded for festival gifts…
With a bit of in game gold for bags a new character slot, also $10, gives you much more room than a storage pane. I’ve used both and even have access to a couple accounts for “guild” storage so I actually do save every collectible drop I get.
They seem to often have sales on the new panes (I got one for $5), and there was a free one for the 4th Anniversary celebration. I always found the GW extras a little pricey as well, but their sale prices are much more fair.
Muling is a major pain in the ass, pun intended, so the $40 I’ve spent (over the course of several months, plus the free anniversary tab) on extra Xunlai storage panes was well worth the cost.
Besides, given the amount of enjoyment GW’s given me over the years, I don’t mind tossing them a few bucks every now and then, at least while I’m actively playing… (on a break because the Winds of Change are very repetitive and taxing and extremely difficult on my Warrior, even with Spiritway Heroes)
Instead of muling, dump everything. Many people like the 20/20 wands from the jade sea as well as any weapons you want.
Otherwise, there just isn’t that much you really want to keep around, unless you can find an identifiable use for it. Nicholas items used to be on that list of keepables, but he just restarted his rotation randomly, and so its not really worth it unless you have lots of space.